Applied Rationality focuses on public policy issues and tries to take a liberal perspective that is consistent (comments to the posts will often show otherwise) with neoclassical, rational-choice economics.

Friday, July 23, 2010

If at first you don't secede

Yet another Republican "patriot" is raising the spectre of secession if the reactionary minority doesn't get its way.

Rep. Zach Wamp (R-03) suggested TN and other states may have to consider seceding from the union if the federal government does not change its ways regarding mandates.

"I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government," said Wamp during an interview with Hotline OnCall.

He lauded Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), who first floated the idea of secession in April '09, for leading the push-back against health care reform, adding that he hopes the American people "will send people to Washington that will, in 2010 and 2012, strictly adhere" to the constitution's defined role for the federal government.

"Patriots like Rick Perry have talked about these issues because the federal government is putting us in an untenable position at the state level," said Wamp...

Perhaps Rep. Wamp has forgotten the oath that he swore before the Almighty promising to bear allegiance to the United States (italics added):

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Apparently, allegiance is a sometime thing.

As is Rep. Wamp's concern regarding unfunded mandates on the states. Rep. Wamp was singing a different tune when he voted for (and still boasts about) the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 which imposed numerous requirements on state systems of higher education and threatened states with a loss of federal education funding if they cut their own financing of higher education (see section 116, pp. 36-37).